“You’re a small man with a fake bistro.” – Gordon Ramsay
This was one of those the-owner-is-an-egotistical-maniac editions of Kitchen Nightmares.
The particulars concern the Mill Street Bistro, in rural Norwalk, Ohio. “The word ‘fine dining’ is obnoxious if you can’t back it up,” owner Joe Nagy tells us.
After checking out Joe’s farm, which provides “fresh, sustainable, local” food for Mill Street Bistro (which could not help but put me in the mind of Portlandia), Gordon Ramsay headed over to the restaurant for his initial round of inspections. While the editing of Kitchen Nightmares is often heavy-handed, even by reality television standards, it was clear as day that the French onion soup that Gordon Ramsay sampled was greasy and sloppy looking (read: it looked like a pile of greasy slop).
And when Ramsay went on to say, with his quintessential inflection of disgust, “If there’s one thing that should never go in quesadilla, it’s elk,” I couldn’t help but think that that is a universal food truism. Somewhat akin to one I myself coined many years ago during a cross country road trip: “Never eat Chinese food from a roadside stand in Wyoming.”
As was to be expected, Joe flipped the [insert the cuss-type word here] out upon hearing of Ramsay’s critiques. A classic Kitchen Nightmares scene ensued with Joe attempting (badly) to defend his menu board announcing the Fresh Catch of the Day… which is really four-day-old frozen fish, “fresh to the region at the time it is caught” (or some such).
As the Mill Street Bistro is a two-parter, we leave off in the Kitchen Nightmare trenches, with Ramsay just firing up on all cylinders, investigating the poorly organized storage room, with its inappropriately frozen seafood and so forth. And we leave off with a screaming match between Ramsay and Joe over dropping raw onions into the French onion soup. And you know that means it’s on.
But really the fun of this episode comes in the form of a truly deluded and dense restaurateur in Joe.
More thoughts on this installment of Kitchen Nightmares:
- I like that the servers have to use the word “features” as opposed to “specials” when discussing special menu items with customers.
- It’s never a complete episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen, or any other Ramsay-associated product until we hear announced that something is raw.
- “I am self-taught by old school Europeans.” – Joe
🍽 Want more? Check out Pop Thruster’s Kitchen Nightmares episode reviews (there’s a lot).
Some stats and info about Kitchen Nightmares – “Mill Street Bistro, Part 1”
TV SHOW – Kitchen Nightmares
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Reality TV, Food TV Shows, Trashtastic TV
STARS – Gordon Ramsay
This review was originally published on TV Geek Army.